


Eating Crow

by blue_sun



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: 100 Themes Challenge, Gen, I don't believe she took this BS lying down, Leah rejects The Wolf Thing, Pack Dynamics, Swearing, which Leah also rejects
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 16:48:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19977313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_sun/pseuds/blue_sun
Summary: Leah reserves the right to be pissed as fuck at the thing that’s tearing apart her life.





	Eating Crow

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd and smashed out over a couple of hours late in the evening to combine a writing prompt from years ago with a note-form drabble (also from a few years ago). 
> 
> Anyway, here's Leah being unapologetic.

**eating crow** (v.) – _a colloquial idiom in some English-speaking countries that means humiliation by admitting having been wrong after taking a strong position_

\- . - . - . - . -

Leah reserved the righted to be pissed as fuck as the thing tearing apart her life. She made that opinion plain to everyone. It gave her a reputation for ferocity and vicious unfairness.

She’d never had delusions of grandeur, just a vague idea that she deserved more than a dead-end life. And here was this Thing to ruin it. So she didn’t always dig too deeply. So occasionally that turned out to lead to mis-apportioned blame. It didn’t make the blame undeserved.

Initially, the thing was Emily. Leah’s cousin had come over from the Makah Reservation one weekend, just like normal, to crash in Leah’s bed, eat junk food, and discuss why Leah’s two-year-devoted boyfriend might be treating Leah like a plague-blanket. Sam came by to apologise. He never did apologise. Not for avoiding her, anyway.

Watching Emily be chased all over town inoculated Leah to that hatred. No woman deserved that. Emily was a sister. Sam was the traitor.

So then it was Sam. Sam the changeable. Sam the untrustworthy. Sam playing the souped-up Boy Scout while he intimidated people into obeying. Sam harassing Emily into compliance, and breaking apart Leah’s only plan to get off the Reservation. Sam in the rain in shorts and nothing else watching Leah’s house from the dark forest.

He often didn’t even have shoes, and didn’t explain why. Perhaps he still wanted to watch out for Leah, Seth suggested. Around school, they said Sam still cared for Leah even though he didn’t want her.

Leah bared her teeth and shut the curtains. Fuck that guy.

When the fever and the sweats came, she had to sleep with the curtains thrown and the window open. The rain came in. Sam was still out in the woods. Watching. She could practically smell him.

She could smell him.

So lastly, it was neither Emily, nor Sam. The thing to blame was the Curse. The changing of shape and skins. Fuck _that_ in particular.

She returned to the house naked except for mud and one of Sam’s button-down shirts. He’d found her in the woods, howling her fear on four legs, and startled her back to human. Her fever had broken. So had her skin.

It was early morning, and raining again, and her mother had left Seth to get himself ready for school to judge by his position on the couch with a triangle of toast in his mouth while he tied his shoes.

“Leah?” he called as she shoved the kitchen door shut. Her finger smeared muddy prints on the white wood.

Leah took stock. She was naked under Sam’s shirt, dripping rainwater and blood on the linoleum, and she was a shapeshifter with a telepathic link into her ex-lover’s mind. But mainly, she was wearing his shirt. Wearing his smell again when her senses were so sharp, so new, made her want to puke.

She did puke.

“Hey,” quavered Seth, coming to the bathroom door frightened by her appearance and her running straight past him without a word for the bathroom. “Are you okay?”

There were bird bones, blood, and feathers in the toilet bowl. Leah kicked the door closed.

Finally, it was the shapeshifting she hated. Each time, she had been proven… not wrong, but incomplete, in her assessment of where to apportion blame. But this was it. This was the ultimate curse and crime against her.

She made sure to let them all know that. Sam sent his mini-me’s to bring her to the fold, and Leah sent them back with scuffs, bruises, and Sam’s crumpled, unwashed shirt. She didn’t want to hear anything they had to say. If she was cursed to be a wolf all her life, she would do it alone. It didn’t have to be the ruination of all things.

Before she sent the shirt back with Jacob, who came to her door under duress, she rubbed it all over her naked body, narrowly resisting the urge to piss on it for good measure. She hoped the smell of her made Sam sick.

For a time, he stopped sending messengers. The boys kept their distance at school. Leah didn’t smell him in the forest directly behind her house anymore, but only because he pulled his sentinel post a hundred metres back.

A conversation she was not privy to was held in a house on the other side of the Rez.

“It should be me,” Sam declared.

Old Quil, Jacob, and Sue Clearwater raised their eyebrows in identical, wry, incredulity.

“It absolutely should not be you,” said Old Quil.

Leah was curled up on the couch under a blanket when boots clumped up the steps. She hadn’t been shape-changing, hoping avoidance would be its own cure. In response, the fever was back with a vengeance and she felt scarcely human. The sound of foreign steps made it irrelevant.

Seth started in alarm as she sat bolt upright, upsetting the popcorn and disturbing their first sibling night since her Episode.

Between the tread, the smells, and the particular creak of boards under wheels, she identified the comers as Old Quil, Billy Black, her mother—and Sam.

She hadn’t been to school in a week – hadn’t properly gotten up in two days – but out the back window she went, fever and all.

She evaded them all for two days.

On the evening of the second, she turned south instead of going directly home and took what she knew was an intercept path. They’d been searching for her. Sam’s particular resonance in her mind should have warned her off, but she was sick of avoiding him in her own stomping ground. And he had, if nothing else, proven with Emily that he could be destructively persistent.

Leah wasn’t yet capable of quieting her mind sufficient to sneak up on another wolf. She didn’t try. Standing on a rocky outcrop, she stared at the break in the trees where she knew he would appear.

When he did, he stood quietly, blinking up at her through the rain as it tried to plaster his black fur over his eyes.

 _‘Stop looking for me, Fuckface,’_ she thought at him.

A very human crinkle ran up his muzzle. His upper lip peeled back and he growled.

 _‘I’m going home,’_ she thought, satisfied that she had his attention. ‘ _Leave me the fuck alone for twenty-four hours. Then you can come and say whatever bullshit spiel you’ve got planned out.’_

She aborted whatever pompous response he was going to make by flicking her tail and trotting in the direction of home.

When she let herself in the kitchen door, Seth was on the couch again. He sprang up when she entered.

“Leah!” he cried and embraced her, uncaring of her nakedness. She hugged him back very, very tightly.

It was early winter. Time to prune the trees and burn off the garbage. Demonstrating some residual sense of honour not perverted by abandoning his humanity, Sam and his pups allowed her the full twenty-four hours she had demanded. She spent the day gardening and dragging things out to make a pyre. Things had been neglected since her father’s death.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, Sam rolled up in his truck and descended, human, to speak to her. This time he came in full-length jeans, shoes, and the shirt she had given back to him.

Leah had a hatchet in her hand to cut branches from a tree. She kept it there.

Sam was either very secure in his position or very, very stupid. He came well within throwing range and put his hands into his pockets. “I’m the leader of the pack.”

“Who told you that?” Leah asked flatly. Turning, she lopped another branch from the tree and swung it onto the fire. By now it was a good blaze, burning and crackling away in a dead patch on the lawn where they’d always held their bonfires.

“I was the first to phase,” Sam said calmly. “I’m the strongest.”

“You know that’s not how wolves decide who leads,” said Leah. She was sure he did. She was also sure neither of them cared how he justified the legitimacy of his position. He had too many other things to justify.

On cue, he frowned. “You know what you are, Lee.”

She pointed the hatchet at his head. “Don’t call me that.”

“Le—”

“Do you see what I’m holding? I’m sure by now I wouldn’t need it to do damage, but fuck me, it’d be satisfying.”

Sam said nothing. Leah turned and hacked at a large, strong bough, and brought it down.

Sam watched this violence with mute reservation. “You’re a shifter, Leah,” he said as she manoeuvred the branch onto the fire and let it settle. “That means you’re one of us. And if you’re one of us, you’ve got to play by the same rules as everybody else.”

“Fuck you,” said Leah sweetly. “Fuck this. And fuck that.”

“Leah—”

“I’ll make my own pack. Away from you.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” said Sam, taking a step toward her. Leah hefted the hatchet and he stopped. “Not just anyone can be an Alpha,” he insisted.

“If anyone can, I can.”

Sam’s ghost-grin cut her like a blade, sharp with the memory of a hundred in-jokes and laughing afternoons on a blanket together on the beach, in the tray of his truck, in the back of a cinema. “Normally, I’d agree. But this is—Leah, it’s not a decision. It just is how it is. And you’re going to have to deal with that.”

“I don’t have to deal with shit,” Leah said bluntly.

“Enough with the language.”

Leah cackled. “ ‘Enough with the language’? I’m not one of your cubs, Grandpa.” She rounded on him deadly in earnest. “You come onto my territory; tell me how _my_ life is going to be. Now you want to police my tone? Go fuck yourself. Fuck yourself, fuck Paul hiding in the fucking truck, fuck your whole fucking Clan Protector toxic masculinity Animal-Instinct-imprinting schtick.”

Sam thought he was done playing Nice Alpha, she gathered from the way he approached her with chest expanding and shoulders pulling up. His skin began to vibrate, and his cheekbones writhed like worms. She had always possessed a talent for getting under his skin. Now it seemed she possessed one for getting him out of it too.

“You’ll come to my pack or none at all.”

“Did you really,” she drawled, “oh mighty Clan Protector, just threaten to disappear a Native woman? In this day and age?”

From the back window of the house, Seth was watching them apprehensively. In front of her, Sam had deflated somewhat, digesting the implications of his own words. But he was too far gone in this shapeshifter trip to back down now. He only knew of one way to handle these things.

“The Council are behind me.” He said it in a marginally more conciliatory tone but didn’t back out of her space. “It’s the best place for you to learn what’s going on. To understand yourself. What you can expect from the future.”

Nothing. She could expect nothing. Because there was nothing left of even the un-grand plan she’d had for herself. In the window, Seth caught her eye, stiffened, and hurriedly ducked out of sight as if she hadn’t stared right at him.

“It’s really,” Sam added, “the only place.”

Black and white. He used to be better at grey. But this disease – this curse – was eating them all, one by one. One day there would be nothing left. No Emily, no Sam, no family, no Leah.

Leah reserved the right to be enraged at the theft of that. She reserved the right to hate the curse, and all those who furthered its reach.

Seth’s head edged into view against the white of his curtains.

Leah pursed her lips. Then she bit the inside of her cheek hard and swallowed the blood before her new accelerated healing could rob her even of the sensation of being human. “Fine.”

She turned to Sam and swung the hatchet a full 360º with a neat handle-flip her father had taught her, then tucked it into a loop hanging from her belt. Theatrically, she stripped off her gardening gloves and tucked them into her belt as well. “I’ll be part of your little gang-bang. But I won’t like it. I won’t like this. And I won’t like you.”

Sam’s face clouded. “Leah, the pack comes with certain connections. Understandings.”

“The Hivemind, you mean.”

“The mental link, yes. Your issues—”

“Are mine.” She stared very hard at him to make sure she had his absolute attention. “Like my life was. Like it isn’t any more. So like I said: I’ll play along. But I’ve eaten enough crow this year. I’m not eating any fucking more. Nothing anyone says can convince me this is anything other than a fucking curse.”

Sam sighed in a way so reminiscent of his old self that she wanted to hit him with the hatchet just to cut the damn sound out of his throat, to prevent the curse from getting that too.

“Whatever. I’ll take what I can get. For now, just try to steer clear of anyone who might upset you and trigger the shift. And take it easy on the Emily and Imprinting stuff. It’s rough as hell having you bitch about it in our heads twenty-four/seven before you’ve even joined the pack.”

Leah narrowed her eyes at the same time she felt her skin heat, and the change threatened to rip her right out of it again. “Sam,” she said, silky smooth, “you’re here at my home telling me who I am. What I am. Who I can associate with. I will be dead and buried in my goddamn grave before you tell me how to feel about it.”

Sam looked like he wanted to argue her down. Very deliberately, she put her hand on the hatchet and didn’t stop her eyes from flashing the wolf. The way they hurt and bulged, she was sure they were blue as a glacier.

It was Sam who broke eye contact. Without a word he turned and went back to the truck. Paul pushed the door open and Sam climbed in without a backward glance. Leah watched the truck lumber away down the potholed road. A branch rolled out of the fire. She kicked it back on without looking at it.

Oh yeah, she’d been off target about a few things this year. But she wasn’t wrong about this, and no pack of sweaty, stinking boys with a mutual Messiah Complex were going to convince her that she was.


End file.
